Update & New Features: Sell Merch Worldwide

A new update has been released for PodPledge today! This update expands on several features, and adds some new goodies as well. Here's what's new:

Today's update includes the following neat new items:

Merchandise Sales

Project owners outside the U.S. can now sell merchandise on their Project page. (Previously, this feature was only available to project owners in the U.S.) Project owners outside the U.S. will have the option to assign custom "Flat Rate" shipping rules to the merch they sell. See the next item for more details.

Multiple options are now available for calculating shipping fees for merchandise. These options are:

No Shipping
If selected, shipping fees will not be charged when the merchandise item is purchased.

USPS Shipping
If selected, the merchandise item's weight and dimensions will be used to calculate real-time shipping rates from the US Postal Service. (This option is available only to project owners in the U.S.)

Flat Rate Shipping
If selected, shipping will be charged based on a custom shipping rule that the project owner specifies. The merchandise item's shipping fees can be charged per each unit of the item purchased, or just once for the entire order. Additionally, two custom shipping rules can be applied to the item: one for domestic orders (in which the customer is in the same country as the seller), and international orders (in which the customer is in a different country than the seller.)

Added a "Display Order" field for merchandise. This provides sellers with total control over the order their merch items are displayed on their page. (Previously, merch was listed in alphabetical order.)

Message Center

Improved the way mailbox messages are handled. Previously messages would be viewed and updated in a popup window. Now, a dedicated "Message Center" page has been added. All messages can be viewed and replied to on the Message Center page, instead of in a popup window.

The icon at the top of each page that displays the number of messages in your mailbox will now show the number of unread messages, instead of the total number of all your messages.

Fixed an issue which only one message in a mailbox containing multiple messages could be replied to.

Miscellaneous

On the Project Performance page, the earnings graph is now a "stacked" line graph. Each bar on the graph has a section displaying the pledges, Tip Jar, and merchandise earnings for each day. (Previously, only the value of each day's pledges were displayed.)

The earnings and traffic charts on the Project Performance page can now be searched by date range. (Previously, it displayed all dates since the project's launch, which could result in a hard to read graph for longer projects.)

The "new password" and "confirm new password" fields in the customer account area's "My Profile" page will now disable autocomplete, which could have been causing an error message when some users attempted to save that page without manually completing both those fields.

The "Distributions Of Funds" page has been updated to better display merchandise sales and shipping fee values.

Enjoy!

These updates are already in place on the website, and ready to use. There's more updates in development, so watch for more exciting new features and improvements in the days to come. In the meantime, we hope these updates help you to Stay Inspired!

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